Political hack/former IPCC lead author Raymond T. Pierrehumbert on Mitt Romney: "Perhaps we should call him a Climate Clown...He just can't stop trumpeting his love affair with Satan's Rock [coal]"

By now we know that Paul Ryan has more or less declared himself to be a full-blown climate change denialist. But what are we to make of Mitt Romney?

Perhaps we should call him a Climate Clown, since he seems to think global climate catastrophes are a laughing matter. ...Last time I checked, America was part of the globe, so if the globe warms, America warms with it, and every ton of carbon dioxide America adds to the atmosphere adds to the collective warming we all suffer. [Hey Raymond: Where I live, the average year-round temperature is 45 F. If the average temperature rises to 47 F, why would that make me "suffer"?] ....Whatever you call Romney, it's clear he has a coal complex as big as the Powder River Basin. He just can't stop trumpeting his love affair with Satan's Rock. "...As expanded natural gas supplies continue to cut into domestic demand for U.S. coal, the next big fight will be over vastly expanded coal exports to Asia, and it will make the fight over the Keystone XL pipeline look like a minor skirmish. I know who I want on my side in that fight, and it is not the coal industry's dream candidate.

Raymond T. Pierrehumbert is the Louis Block Professor in Geophysical Sciences at the University of Chicago. He was a lead author of the IPCC Third Assessment Report, and is a fellow of the American Geophysical Union. He writes episodically for RealClimate.org.

IPCC lead author Pierrehumbert does an extremely poor job of pretending he's a politically disinterested, just-the-facts man of science: He refers to "little fantasies that many of us progressives use to fend off the nightmare of a Romney win"